His men had
small difficulty in forcing a way to the office, where they served to
complete the cordon of defence and the garrison of the bridge-end. Two
men had been killed and some half-dozen of the rioters. He pushed into
the building, and found a terrified Kashmir clerk sternly watched by his
servant and the Sikh orderly. The man, with tears streaming down his
face, was attempting to read the messages which the wires brought.
Thwaite picked up and read the latest, which was a scrawl in quavering
characters over three telegraph forms. It was from Ladcock at Gilgit,
saying that he was having a row of his own with the navvies there, and
that he could send no reinforcements at present. If he quieted the
trouble in time he would try and hold the Mazeno Pass, and meanwhile he
had done his best to wake the Punjab. As the wires would be probably
cut within the next hour there would be no more communications, but he
besought Thwaite to keep the invader in the passes, as the whole south
country was a magazine waiting for a spark to explode. The message ran
in short violent words, and Thwaite had a vision of Ladcock, short,
ruddy, and utterly out of temper, stirred up from his easy life to hold
a frontier.
There was no word from Yasin, as indeed he had expected, for the tribes
on the highlands about Hunza and Punial were the most disaffected on the
Border, and doubtless the first to be tampered with.
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